Metabolic Engineering of Plant Cellular Metabolism: Methodologies, Advances, and Future Directions

Plant natural products are useful compounds, such as pigments, fragrances, pharmaceuticals used for the treatment of several human diseases. Development of plant manipulation techniques, such as particle bombardment, Agrobacterium-mediated transformation, vacuum infiltration, agrodrench, viral vector, protoplasts fusion and ultrasound, as well as recombinant DNA, and genetic technologies applied toward metabolic engineering of bioactive plant natural products are presented, together with different genetic engineering methods, such as overexpression of transgenes, multiple expression of transgenes, gene silencing, and transcription factors as powerful tools for the engineering of biosynthetic pathways. Future perspectives and the potential of different approaches are presented to highlight how a better understanding of secondary metabolite pathways represents a direct successful highway to genetic manipulation of desired metabolic pathways.